Dan Mangan is making the evolution from ‘guy with a guitar’ to Juno contender

Let’s just say one of these things is not like the other. Mangan isn’t best friends with Lil Wayne or the Muppets. He doesn’t budget for pyro walls when he goes on tour. He never competed on Canadian Idol.

But the Vancouver singer-songwriter has at least one thing in common with all those other names: Mangan has four Juno nominations going into this weekend’s event, and, with the aforementioned company excepted, that puts him up for more categories than any other contender. Still, the 28-year-old is the only one who’s a first-time Juno nominee, and so, included in his haul of nods (for Songwriter of the Year, Alternative Album of the Year and Video of the Year), he’s also up for Best New Artist.

“It’s pretty wild,” says Mangan from Vancouver, days after returning from his fifth South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas. “I’ve got the same (number) of nominations as Justin Bieber.” (Actually, The Biebz only has two, but who’s counting?)

“It’s kind of a level of mainstream — notoriety, I guess, is the word — that I’ve never really experienced before,” explains Mangan, who released his third album, Oh Fortune, last fall. He shudders — then chuckles — at the notion of suddenly being dogged by ET Canada, eTalk, or whatever infotainment programs chase Can-con celebrities.

Still, since the nominations announcement in February, Mangan’s Juno story has had some traction. In early March, for instance, there was some noise from Mangan’s label, Arts & Crafts, when the musician wasn’t given a performance slot at this year’s broadcast, despite his top-contender status. “Dan Mangan hasn’t been asked to perform on the show, and you know, that’s frustrating to us,” A&C president Jeffrey Remedios told The Canadian Press, going on to question the Juno organizers’ decision-making. For his part, Mangan’s cool with it. He won’t perform, but he’ll present during the April 1 telecast at Scotiabank Place, in addition to playing the non-televised awards March 31, and hosting the Juno Songwriters’ Circle at Centrepointe Theatre the afternoon before the big show. “Personally, I’m not as frustrated as they are,” Mangan says of his friends at A&C, “just cause I’m a little flabbergasted at getting nominated in the first place.”

Flabbergasted. There’s a good word. Because, for every time Mangan says he’s “excited” about the Junos, he’ll temper his statement with something about how profoundly weird this all is.

“I don’t want to be unappreciative,” he says, “It’s a whole new thing, and it’s really cool, but it’s,” he sighs, “just strange. It’s being honoured by something you never expected to get honoured by.... People who wouldn’t normally pay attention to the indie, Canadian music scene are all of a sudden talking about you.”

But oh, what fortune.

The Junos reach a national audience. (Last year’s broadcast was viewed by 6.5 million people.) Mangan’s not unknown to Canadian music fans — he’s a 2009 Verge Awards artist of the year winner, a 2010 Polaris Shortlist nominee, the gravel-voiced dude behind Robots (CBC Radio 3’s 2009 Bucky Award winner for song of the year and your favourite tune about cutesy automatons). But as many a nominee will tell you, the Junos is the one Canadian music event that even your grandma will see, and what luck that Mangan’s found that spotlight while equipped with Oh Fortune.

The record marks a growth spurt — even if Mangan has been bearded, six-foot-something, and baritone-voiced for some time now. While 2009’s fan-beloved Nice Nice Very Nice was largely a record in the guy-with-a-guitar esthetic — its forcefulness of sound frequently reliant on how hard and/or fast Mangan could strum a guitar — the Mangan on Oh Fortune is now making noise with the luxury of a full band. From the opening track, About As Helpful As You Can Be Without Being Any Help At All — which is among the compositions being recognized under Mangan’s Songwriter of the Year nomination — the album flutters awake with the sound of an orchestra. That isn’t to say this is an album of nothing but chamber-pop — because it isn’t — but there’s an attention to gut-grabbing arrangements on Oh Fortune that was missing in the simplicity and foot-stomping of Nice Nice Very Nice.

Around the time of Oh Fortune’s release, Mangan would often mention, in interviews and onstage banter, how the album marked an evolution from his “guy with a guitar” persona.

“Yeah, yeah, certainly,” Mangan confirms. “It’s been a really natural process, and it feels like it’s been happening at the right rate of speed. I really honoured that time in my life, of being an acoustic troubadour, singer-songwriter bloke kind of thing. It was very important to my kind of education on the road. I spent a lot of time travelling alone, and it taught me a lot about, you know, how to be a travelling musician. But since I kind of started collecting players in a band, I’ve just been wandering further from that.”

Mangan’s band includes Gord Grdina (guitar), Kenton Loewen (drums) and, depending on the circumstances, John Walsh or Colin Cowan on bass. “The guys are just incredible musicians,” says Mangan. “Vancouver’s got such a vibrant kind of outside-thinking experimental-jazz scene, so the players are largely from that community.” (Grdina and Loewen, for instance, also perform together in jazz group the Gord Grdina Trio.)

“It’s a community that thrives on improvisation and thrives on just spontaneous performance. And I love it. I’ve learned so much from playing with these guys,” he says, crediting much of Oh Fortune’s next-level sound to their involvement. (Well, that and exhaustive practice. Mangan played more than 200 shows last year. “You know, you spend every part of your life trying to get better at something and you get better at it,” he says. “And once the band kind of came around, it was like, ‘What’s next?’”)

“Probably, at first, when some of these guys were in my band, musically, the things that were going on was probably not the most exciting thing for them. But they enjoyed it because maybe it was just a good experience overall. It was sort of a good scene, or a good hang, or something like that,” says Mangan, recalling the time around Nice Nice Very Nice’s 2009 release. “Then slowly, the music I was writing became more interesting to them, and, at the point that that happened, they all dug in and doubled down on their investment into this project. So you have these people who started as, you know, just session players, just guys I knew could play, and I asked them to play and they did it. And then, as we progressed, and as more tours started unfolding, all of a sudden, they were getting really invested in it, and they were really taking some ownership of the project.”

Mangan knows the results didn’t go unnoticed. “I think people came at Oh Fortune saying it was super-weird for Dan Mangan, which was great, because I’m not interested in making the same record over and over again.

“It doesn’t seem weird to me that I would start as a guy with a guitar and then not want to do that anymore. It doesn’t seem like a stretch. It just seems like a guy who’s working out exactly what he wants to say and how he wants to say it.

“I feel like every record has gotten progressively weirder and there’s no expectation that that will cease.”

Dan Mangan is nominated for Best New Artist, Songwriter of the Year, Alternative Album of the Year and Video of the Year.

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Dan Mangan is making the evolution from ‘guy with a guitar’ to Juno contender